Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(35)

Beloved, I know what you’re thinking. You’re not considering how social deprivation leads desperate people to act desperately. You’re not thinking of how communities bereft of hope and resource claim as its victims the people who seek to escape its fatal grip. You’re not thinking of how many of you were spared such a fate because of God’s grace and white privilege. Many of you are thinking that black folk kill each other every day without saying a mumbling word. Then we loudly protest a few white cops who kill black “thugs.”

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to ambush me with that “it’s-the-blacks-not-the-cops” claim on Meet the Press. It was right before the decision was made not to bring charges against white cop Darren Wilson, who had killed unarmed black youth Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. “I find it very disappointing that you’re not discussing the fact that 93 percent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks,” Giuliani said. “We’re talking about the exception here.”

The notion that we are indifferent to murders by other blacks is nonsense. But we also know that if Jamal or Willie kills somebody, and they’re caught, they’re going to jail. Cops are rarely held accountable for their slaughter of black people. Neither Jamal nor Willie pledged to protect and serve the community. Neither of them has been issued a badge and a gun to represent the state. The police have a higher standard to meet, a greater obligation to be cautious in using lethal force.

Black folk do protest, to each other, to a world that largely refuses to listen, the killing of blacks by other blacks. We cry out against what goes on in black communities across this nation. We think it is horrid. We know such communities are vexed by problems faced by all neighborhoods that are depleted of dollars and hope. These communities are emptied of good schools. They are deprived of the social and economic buffers that keep Beverly Hills from turning into Beirut. People usually murder where they nest. They aim their rage at easy targets.

Beloved, what you see happening among us is not best understood as black-on-black crime. Rather it is neighbor-to-neighbor carnage. If our neighbors were white, they’d be victims of the same crime that plagues black folk. You are right, however, about those proportions. Ninety-three percent of black folk who are killed are killed by other black folk. But 84 percent of white folk who are killed are killed by other white folk. It’s not necessary to modify the noun murder with the adjective black. It happens in the white world too. Where’s the white-on-white crime rhetoric? Where are the rants against white folk ruining white culture with their murderous ways?

One truth should be clear: If you want interracial killing you have to have interracial communities. Wasn’t that one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dreams? To live in a nation where black and white folk could be victims of crime in integrated neighborhoods? Didn’t he argue that thieves should pay more attention to the content of our Cadillacs than their color? Perhaps I am misremembering?

White folk commit the bulk of the crimes in our nation. And, beloved, it might surprise you that white folk commit the most violent crimes too. According to FBI statistics, black folk committed 36 percent of violent crime in 2015, while white folk committed 42 percent of violent crimes in the same year. White folk consistently lead all other groups in aggravated assault, larceny, illegal weapons possession, arson, and vandalism. And white folk are far more likely to target the vulnerable too. White folk lead the way in forcible rape. You’re also more likely to kill children, the elderly, significant others, family members, and even yourselves. White folk commit a majority of gang-related murders too. A majority of the homicide victims in this country are white. White folk are six times as likely to be murdered by a white person as they are to be taken out by a black “thug.” The white-on-white mayhem is profound, yet no one speaks of it in racial terms.

That’s because the phrase white-on-white crime doesn’t serve a larger ideological purpose. White-on-white crime does not jibe with the exclusive focus on a black-on-black narrative that conservatives, and liberals too, have bought into. The success of that narrative depends on a few things. You had to construct the ghetto as a space of savagery that was unique to black folk. Never mind the fact that its first occupants were the Irish, Poles, Italians—and especially the Jews. Then you had to say that any right-thinking folk wouldn’t kill each other.

But there is no inherent blackness to the crime that occurs in black communities. Take blackness out of the equation and you’d have social engineers and Ivy League professors trying to fix crime-infested communities. We know this because big brains and social reformers from the late 1800s well into the 1930s successfully addressed crime waves set in motion, and endured, by poor European immigrants. Keep blackness in place and you have social engineers and Ivy League professors blasting the intrinsic pathology and inherent depravity of black life. These experts will conclude that our families and neighborhoods produce the seeds of their own destruction. The 1965 Moynihan Report on the Negro family—a report by Harvard professor and Johnson administration official Daniel Patrick Moynihan that warned that a castrating black matriarchy and a “tangle of pathology” threatened the black family—is a famous example.

Beloved, you don’t stop there. You feel compelled to make crime merely a matter of ethical collapse. You don’t mention the systemic removal of goods and services that drive some folk to crime. Nor do you talk much of black folk lacking the social supports that other ethnic groups enjoy. There is hardly any mention of the failure of the markets that are supposedly neutral, but which, in fact, favor those who aren’t black or poor.